Down In Old Casablanca-With Brad Pitt’s “Allied” In Mind   

By Seth Garth 

“Nobody ever said I didn’t have a sense of irony,” blurred out Steve Roberts to his friend Jack Davis as they both sat at Molly’s Diner in Riverdale, a town about fifty miles to the west of Boston for their usual weekly Saturday morning breakfast get-together to catch up on each other’s week (by the way breakfast not brunch despite the eleven in the morning meeting time they are not those kind of guys). The point of the comment about Steve’s sense of irony had been around a film that he had seen the previous night with his wife Lana at the Majestic Theater. The film the favorable reviewed latest Brad Pitt’s effort Allied which had its initial scenes set in Casablanca out in the deserts of Morocco. 

Now the main reason that Lana wanted to go, was bugging him to go to a World War II romance was to see the female co-star, Marion Cotillard, who was rumored to have been the reason that Brad and Angelina Jolie had busted up. Steve had had his own reasons for wanting to see the film once he knew the story-line involved wartime Casablanca. He had Googled the film’s title to see what reviewers were saying about the film and had come across a review by the fairly well-known movie critic Sam Lowell on the blog American Film History. The gist of Sam’s mostly favorable review was that Casablanca was a tough town to keep up a romance in, at least in the movies. Sam had given the example of the fate of Rick of Rick’s Café in the actual wartime classic Casablanca, actual meaning here that it was produced in1942 at the height of the war,  din   who got short-changed in his rekindled love affair with Ilsa whom he had met in Paris before the Germans came crashing down on the town. Yeah, Rick, played almost perfectly by rugged no non-sense tough guy Humphrey Bogart at the height of his acting career, took it on the chin for the cause so that his Ilsa (played by fetching Ingrid Bergman) could go away from Casablanca with her husband the Resistance leader Victor Lazlo (played by Paul Henreid) to fight the bad guys another day.         

After reading Sam Lowell’s review Steve sat in his chair in the den where he had his computer set up and thought for a while about that old time film and about how no matter how many times he had seen it, he had lost count but it must have been over ten, that classic would always remain the definitive wartime romance film despite the build-up over the Pitt’s vehicle. He wondered to himself (he didn’t dare tell Lana that he was already predisposed to Casablanca when she would ask him the inevitable question about where he would rate Allied in the film universe) that night how this new film also centered in Casablanca would hold up. Casablanca would be a tough act to follow between the acting, the story-line and the flat out appeal of the film during a period when people were being asked, and in many cases not asked but told, to sacrifice more than an affair with an errant lover.   

As Steve attempted to sleep that night he started going through the story-line of Casablanca. Rick, beautifully roughed Rick of Rick’s Café was just sitting around his joint piling up dough from his casino and booze action in Vichy-held French Morocco during the early part of World War II , paying off the local Vichy cops and trading with a Moslem middleman in the notorious Casbah to get whatever pain-killers his clientele desired. (That middleman, always known then as the Fat Man, by the way was a guy he had worked with before in the States before the war when he for a short while ran a detective agency in Frisco town under an alias, Miles Archer, with a guy named Sam Spade, when the Fat man was working some rare bird scam with some frill Rick had to send over. The Fat man got out of town faster than the cops could grab him and when Rick landed in the Casbah there was the Fat Man working this commission trade for everything from heroin to stolen merchandise to women, any kind of women from Amazons to pygmies and everything who knew very love trick including some that dare not speak their name. There were profits aplenty for everybody how do you think Rick got the damn café-a beautiful front for every kind of illegal activity as long as you paid Louie off-or some Vichy official)

But from the get go you knew, knew as sure as anything that here was a man with a past-maybe killed somebody for love or vengeance who knows. Maybe on the run like half the emigres in the town, maybe ran afoul of somebody who it was not good to run afoul of but whatever reason there he was tough guying it all the way. Then the letters of transit, the damn letters of transit worth their weight in gold for anybody, any desperate anybody needing to get the hell out of Africa to anyplace. The beauty of the letters was that the holder had free passage out-no questions asked. Men have killed, as the courier running the letters had found out, for less and have been killed as well. They say life was cheap in Casablanca in those days and maybe they were right, and maybe life was cheap all over the world just then.        

Then she came in and you might have known that Rick’s dour countenance was not over having killed a man, or men, had not been on the run from some failed scheme, maybe some betrayed scheme but that since Adam’s time, maybe before, no, surely before it had to be about a woman. Yeah, there she was all dewy-like just like in Paris before the fucking Nazis decided Germany was just too small for the German race, yeah, we have heard that one before, have heard it chimed out many times since. As it turned out she left without a word, no good-bye, nothing just Rick with his nose bent out of joint in the rain in the Paris train station looking stupid.    

She would have her reasons, they always have their reasons is what Rick came to finally figure out, maybe just to keep a guy guessing, maybe just to satisfy some feminine whim. There she was though and whatever hard-boiled Rick (honed from the times when Brigid O’Shaunessey ran him a merry chase back in Frisco town before the war, and before Ilsa’s Paris, over some freaking bird, some stuff of dreams bird that men were also willing to kill for, kill for since life was cheap in Frisco town just then. That was the caper that the Fat Man got out of town just in a nick of time leaving the murderous femme fatale to find her pretty little head in a noose before it was all over) had done to put up a shield around himself that was melting pretty damn fast. So fast that Louie the local pay-off gendarme working hand-in-glove with the Nazi scum noticed it, noticed that that hard-boiled don’t give a damn about the world let it go to hell in a handbasket (hell he had even cracked a lot of wisecracker jokes with some Nazi high muck who was asking about his allegiances-told him that where he came the Nazis might want to take a pass on trying to overrun) had made an exception once she came through that front door of his gin mill.       

Yeah, she had her reason. See she was married to Victor Lazlo, yeah, that Victor Lazlo, the great Eastern European resistance leader whom the Nazis were salivating to get their hands on-put out of commission even though they knew, knew for certain and for public consumption in their greedy little small minds that such figures were like so much wind against the power of the German juggernaut. Yeah the great Victor Lazlo whom she had thought dead, erroneous thought dead since every other day there were report s that he had been captured and executed only to be found in some other country being hidden by the local resistance fighters and the Germans would again put out the lie that he was a goner. So Ilsa had latched onto in all sincerity Rick on the rebound, on the lonely rebound in romantic Paris (she would later agree to the sentiment that they, she and Rick, would whatever happened later would always have Paris). Here is what you have to know though, know about a guy like Victor Lazlo. Guys like him will stand alone if necessary against a whole array of Nazi-infested tanks but in the quiet night they need a woman, need a woman’s sexual allure to make them whole, to make them able to go out the next day and face what tanks have to be faced. And women like Ilsa, farm-fresh younger women need a guy who is ready to face that day but in the quiet of the night succumb to their allure. If you want to know the truth of that think about Rick on that last day in Paris when he had to get out or his was going to be facing some serious hell from the encroaching Nazis who had a price on his head. He could have forgone the lovely Ilsa if he had only been worried about his own skin at that moment. Don’t forget too despite his don’t give a damn manner in Casablanca before Ilsa arrived that our dear Rick had a past, had smuggled guns to the Ethiopians when Mussolini decided to pick on somebody not his own size and fought beside the International Brigades as a “pre-mature anti-Fascist when that designation meant something in world politics. So Ilsa was like catnip to a guy like Rick. And he to her.          

Reasons enough I guess. In any case that is all stuff from the past, water over the dam or under the bridge take your choice. What was important now were those damn letters of transit-the free ticket to wherever no questions asked. Documents Victor Lazlo could have surely used as the Nazis and their Vichy henchmen (sweet corrupt Louie too he was cutting corners to save anybody’s just then but only his own) started putting the head on to get him under their wing. Documents too that Rick-with luscious dreams of Ilsa in tow could use to get out of the stinking Casbah and back with regular civilized types in whatever country he decided to de-plane.       

This is where a guy like Rick, busted up in love, cynical almost by profession (and culture having grown up in Hell’s Kitchen in hard-knocks New York so that trait needed to survive in one piece) and anxious to move on trips you up though. He will make that fateful gesture to love and pull a switch-will let Victor and Ilsa slip out of Casablanca and do whatever do-gooders do when they are not on the run. Nice. And Rick, well, Rick will always have that smell of her perfume to think about on lonely nights out on whatever front he finds himself. The last thing he said to Louie who turned traitor cold to the Vichy-Nazi machine when he let the airplane fly out unhindered was that Casablanca was tough on the love nerves (for public consumption they say he said that he and Lou were starting a beautiful friendship but that was all bullshit if you knew Rick in those days out in the heat of the stinking desert).   

Yeah, a tough act to follow no doubt. Here is how times have change though, or maybe not change as far as wartime Casablanca was concerned. Casablanca this time as the 1942 wartime backdrop to the action in Brad Pitt’s Allied. A resourceful highly skilled British Intelligence Officer Max, the role that the pretty boy handsome Pitt plays, is sent to that stinking town on a mission to take out the German ambassador to the Vichy-regime there. His local contact was a much valued French woman Resistance fighter, Marianne. (No more passive Ilsa companions edging on their man to greater exploits by day and using their sexual allure by night to get their guys back in one piece to face the next day. Now they are fighting side by side with the men on the dangerous missions-and doing okay at that). The ploy they are to use to gain the confidence of the local Nazi establishment in order to get an invite to an embassy gala is to act as a romantic married couple. All the signs of a happy couple are played out and they gain entrée to the event after some close call stuff about getting the tickets. During the course of “playing house” they actually do fall madly in love, an act consummated in a tiny car out in a desert whirling dervish of a wind storm, an act in a film which would not have passed the Hollywood censors back in that day as such things were only implied at best by a fade-out.    

Of course after the assassination of the German ambassador they had to flee town he to head back to England and she, well, she was going to London too since our dear Max asked her to marry him. Once she arrived in England they were dutifully married and had a child (born during a German bombing raid over London) and then things got dicey. There were serious allegations that sweet quick on the trigger Marianne was actually a German spy. Max refused to believe that hard fact, hell, hadn’t they pulled off that caper in Casablanca. But the evidence began to pile up, seriously pile up that she was not who she seemed to be. She was in the thick of the espionage ring the Germans were running. In the end maybe she did love Max, did love her infant daughter so when the deal went down she committed suicide. Hard-bitten storyline, very hard.  But you know that reviewer Sam Lowell from the American Film History blog was right was right Casablanca was a tough dollar, a tough place for love to blossom.